A varactor is a semiconductor device having a voltage-sensitive capacitance. Frequently, the space-charge region and the accumulation at the surface of a semiconductor contacting an insulator are altered as a function of applied voltage to produce a bias-dependent capacitance.
The variability of the capacitance in a varactor may be advantageously employed in various electronic circuits to provide useful functions in amplifiers, oscillators, and frequency synthesizers. For example, varactors may be used to construct voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO), which generates a tunable stable frequency without employing a circuit with multiple oscillators. U.S. Pat. No. 7,129,801 to Wu shows an exemplary use of a varactor in a VCO circuit. A VCO is a versatile basic building block for constructing transceiver circuitry, phase locked loop (PLL) circuitry, and other wireless communication circuitry.
Metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) varactors employing a planar configuration are known in the art. Such prior MOS varactors typically employ the same dielectric material as the gate dielectric for the node dielectric separating a first overlying electrode from a second underlying electrode. With the scaling of the gate dielectric in semiconductor technology, however, performance of such MOS varactors is negatively impacted by leakage current through the node dielectric, which has the same thickness as the gate dielectric since both are formed at the same processing step and have identical composition and thickness. While use of a thicker dielectric layer for the node dielectric could reduce leakage current through the prior art varactors, such changes will accompany degradation of device performance for field effect transistors that have a gate dielectric with a correspondingly increased thickness. Further, such an approach negatively impacts the tunability of a varactor by decreasing the maximum capacitance in an accumulation mode.
While deep trench capacitors employing a separate thicker node dielectric with minimal leakage current and high areal capacitance density are also known in the art, such deep trench capacitors are linear capacitors having a constant capacitance, and do not provide any variability in capacitance.
In view of the above, there exists a need for a semiconductor varactor that provides high areal capacitance density and minimal leakage current as well as variability in capacitance, and methods of manufacturing the same.
Further, many semiconductor circuits require varactors as well as linear capacitors. Therefore, there exists a need for a semiconductor structure including such a semiconductor varactor as well as a linear capacitor having high areal capacitance density and minimal leakage current in the same semiconductor chip.